FAMOUS TRIALS.*
THE abnormal is always interesting, and the ruffians whose crimes Mr. Atlay has set forth in his Famous Trials are, happily for us, abnormal one and all. Moreover, there is in the most of them a fierce squalor which makes them curious to contemplate, and suggests many a difficult reflection. What, indeed, is the criminal bias ? What are the motives which lead to hideous, profitless cruelty ? It is not the mere hope of gain, though that may explain the high-spirited highwayman and the stealthy burglar. It is not only cunning and defective imagination, though these qualities give to the scoundrel a reckless efficiency. At beat we can only beg the question by declaring that a man commits crimes because he is a criminal, and has but a weak hold upon his passions.
Of Mr. Atlay's crimes, for instance, not a few are destitute of the common or obvious motive. There seems as little reason that Thurtell should have killed Weave, as that Constance
• Famous Trials. By J. B. -Atlay. London : Grant Richards. Ds.]
Kent should have slain her infant brother. A little irritation, that is all—in the one case of disappointed greed, in the other of irrational jealousy—and maybe it was for their nnex- pecteilness that these crimes, not very thrilling in them- selves, attracted the curiosity of the world. Where the motive is plain, there is no mystery ; where you seek and fumble for an explanation, you touch the fringe of the unknown. But criminals there are who love crime for its own sake, who are driven by an impulsion far stronger than themselves to the commission of the worst sins. A love of excitement goes far to explain their tempera- ment, and many a ruffian has committed murder or arson merely for the sporting odds which be thus lays against detection. When once success has crowned the criminal's ingenuity, he cannot stay his hand ; the uncertainty becomes essential to him, and he takes to poison as to dram-drinking. Palmer, for instance, the Rugeley murderer, for whom, we regret, Mr. Atlay does not find a place, found in poison, not only a solace for himself, but an easy method of discomfiting his foes. When he killed the man Cooke, for whose death he died, he merely owed him a sum of money. Another man would have repudiated the debt, or made an arrangement. Palmer thought it easier to remove his creditor, and to him it seemed so simple an action that he felt no shock of remorse. When Cooke was poisoned his murderer walked some miles to church, and commented on the sermon in his notebook. And Pritchard, the Glasgow doctor who poisoned his wife and mother-in-law with tartar emetic, was just such another as Palmer. He was driven to murder by no motive, save a mistaken sense of the ease and secrecy of the crime. He seems to have cherished an affection for his victims; yet he slew them, in obedience to a stealthy, maniacal impulse, and it is absurd to believe that he committed his double murder because he desired to marry the housemaid. So, Mr. Atlay tells us, "two or three years ago, a servant girl of seventeen made two deliberate attempts to poison a little child not four years old, in order that she might be relieved from having to carry its food up three flights of stairs in a South Kensington house." Here, again, the motive is in- adequate. Doubtless the servant girl objected to the climb. But there is also no doubt that to a selfish disregard of human life she added the hasty conviction that nothing save murder can solve the easiest difficulties.
But the most interesting chapter in Mr. Atlay's book is the story of the Tichborne Claimant. The trial is so recent that it is already sliding into forgetfulness, since it is always true that we know least of contemporary history. But the infamous claim of Arthur Orton to the Tichborne estates was made with such barefaced effrontery, and sustained with such marvellous cleverness, that we have refreshed our memory from Mr. Atlay's pages with the greatest pleasure. Moreover, the case has to-day a topical interest. As Mr. Atlay points out, it bears a strange resemblance to the Dreyfus affair. It began in the action of one man, it ended by involving the whole country ; while Dr. Kenealy, to make the comparison absolute, believed that in defending the butcher of Wagga-Wagga he was unmasking a Jesuit plot. So it was that Tich borne bonds were issued, a Tichborne gazette published, and the pence of the people collected in every town of England. Moreover, the question became one of politics, and Stoke-upon-Trent was held for some years as a pocket-borough (so to say) of the Claimant. Nor is that all : this strange case, which lingered on for seven years, and should (one thinks to-day) have been settled out of hand, was a magnificent opportunity for Judge and advocate. It is strange, indeed, to note how many great reputations were established upon the trial of this illiterate butcher ; and it is a reflection honourable to our Bench and Bar that none save Dr. Kenealy destroyed his career by injudicious advocacy. Nor should we forget that the Lord Chief Justice was given the opportunity of delivering a speech which was a master- piece of eloquence. And yet, despite all this display of talent, there is none who can dispute the palm with Arthur Orton, the engineer of the biggest fraud witnessed in modern times.
When Sir John Coleridge finished his weeks of cross- examination, he freely confessed himself beaten. "Did you ever see a more clever man, more ready, more astute, or with more ability in dealing with information, and making use of the slightest hint dropped by the cross-examining counsel ? Do you not thil.k that many a time he was cross-examining me? Did you not see that be got a deal more out of me than I got out of him, and that be made most uncommon good use of what he did get?" That is high praise indeed; and yet it is scarcely too high. Orton was uneducated, he could neither speak nor spell properly, he thought the Pons Asi- norum was a place, and that Virgil was Greek, and yet by his native shrewdness he dominated the lawyers, and at one moment went very near to lay hands upon the estates to which he had no sort of right. Of course the recognition of Lady Tichborne served him right well, and the sympathy of Hampshire stood him in good stead. Yet there must have been a power of attraction in the ruffian, for his friends over- looked both his perjury and his cowardice. Bat, shrewd as he was, he made one mistake : he could not resist a desire to see the Orton family once more, and his first excursion, when he returned from Australia on his mission of plunder, was to Wapping. However, in the end perjury availed not; common- sense returned to the world; and even Stoke-upon-Trent gave up its allegiance. Bat the Claimant remains in our memory a colossus of impudence, a ruffian whose native shrewdness was well-nigh rewarded by another's lands.
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